After over 12 years online MakeTunes is closing down

I hope you've enjoyed the many years of community and creative process, but obviously the site has many issues these days as I haven't had any time to devote to the running of it for some time. Naturally most people have moved on as a result, and it is still costing thousands a year to keep it online.

Please take this opportunity to download any music you're wanting to keep as the site will be closing down on March 31st.

Music Production Software

It's probably one of the most discussed "missing" features of Propellerheads Reason - the inability to record audio tracks within the program.

Well Propellerheads have now announced their new software package, imaginatively called, "Record".

Record allows the user to, well, record audio tracks, and apply a multitude of effects to them, in a software style and layout that should be very familiar to Reason users. I should clarify at this point, that Record is a standalone program, you don't need to be running Reason as well - though it's likely that many people will choose to run both I would imagine.

As most of you will probably be aware, learning your music production software is a vital part of being comfortable in your home studio, especially being able to quickly translate what's in your head to what people can listen to.

One way this can be helped along is learning the keyboard shortcuts, or hotkeys, for the commands you use most often. This can save a LOT of time, and make your music creation process much more streamlined and intuitive.

For those of you using Reason 4.0 (and potentially other versions of Propellerheads Reason), you might like to check out the excellent Reason Keyboard Commands chart linked at the end of this article. It's been created by Peff using a full size Mac keyboard layout graphic, with all the Reason keyboard commands scattered across the keys. Print this out and keep it near your home studio keyboard, to help you learn the commands as you make your tunes!

No one likes getting stuck with a product they bought which just doesn't work for them... but fortunately with the wide range of music software available these days, we really don't need to be scraping by with a home studio running software that makes our blood boil! Different software really does work better for different people.

Plenty of audio software companies make Demo versions available, so I thought I'd put together this list of some of the main contenders....

Most of you will be familiar with FL Studio, and I know many of you swear by it. Well the latest addition, FL Studio 8, has been made available, the culmination of 10 years of FLstudio development, and it looks to have a whole bunch of useful new features.

Celemony have announced that their upcoming release of their Melodyne v2 Plugin will include Direct Note Access, which allows for MIDI-like complex alteration of audio data, even when those notes are buried in chords, and even other instruments. It's pretty amazing stuff.

You can take a single audio recording or sample, and break it into its component notes - and then adjust those notes accordingly, whether it be pitch shifting, moving the notes position, or the length of a particular note within a chord being played. The list goes on.

Here is one of the examples from the video, showing a single audio recording full of chords, expanded out into all its individual notes. Each of these single notes can then be altered independantly of the rest of the notes.

The best way to see what this new Direct Note Access is capable of, is to check out their announcement video below, which contains several examples of it in action.

While the majority of home musicians and small studios use either Macs or Windows based PCs, there are a growing number of Linux users wanting to setup audio sequencing and editing software on their chosen operating system.

One of the leading audio and MIDI sequencers for Linux is, the rather oddly named, Rosegarden.

The main sequencer view of Rosegarden - similar to many sequencer layouts on other operating systems: